I once read that the secret of Stephen King’s success is that he’s very good at making you fall in love with likeable, believable characters… and then killing them in horrible ways.
Joss Whedon is the Stephen King of TV. When a Whedon character dies, it means something.
Exactly. I think Cordelia and Spike were 2 of the best characters to point out the stuff we all were thinking though.
I love this one from the *Angel *series. Spike is looking down at Angel and Rachel, a woman he just rescued.
Spike [Rachel voice]: How can I thank you, you mysterious black-clad hunk of a night-thing?
Spike [Angel voice]: No need, little lady, your tears of gratitude are enough for me. You see I was once a badass vampire, but love and a pesky curse defanged me. No, not the hair! Never the hair!
Spike [Rachel voice]: But there must be some way I can show my appreciation?
Spike [Angel voice]: No, helping those in need’s my job and working up a load of sexual tension and prancing away like a magnificent puff is truly thanks enough.
Spike [Rachel voice]: I understand. I have a nephew who is gay, so…
Spike [Angel voice]: Say no more. Evil’s still afoot. And I’m almost out of that nancy-boy hair-gel I like so much. Quickly, to the Angel-mobile, away.
As a writer he seems pretty much up my alley. Lucky for me I have a friend who’s a Joss nut…so methinks I’m gonna borrow some DVDs of hers in the near future…
A lot of TV SF has its head up its ass. Whedon doesn’t. He knows it’s supposed to be fun. His dialog, as you can see from the examples above, is very tounge in cheek and self-aware. It’s the kind of things fanboys and fangirls might say watching a show.
Yet at the same time, he can be very heart-wrenching and poignant. His characters suffer authentically.
He’s a master of timing. His shows are perfectly paced, especially the first five seasons of Buffy. Big Bad gets introduced early, sort of fades into the background for a few stand-alones, then is brought back for a climactic, exciting battle. There is no sense of lost plots or dragging “will they ever answer this question” frustration that you get from other shows. Whedon has the common sense to finish his arcs over a season.
I think he has strong female characters. I like that.
And he’s not afraid to have them fuck-up or be flawed, either. Nuanced charaters, every one.
I’ll just repeat what a lot of the others are saying, but in my own words. I thought Angel and Dr. Horrible were pretty good, Dollhouse was good. I never watched Firefly or Serenity (OMG!). Buffy was excellent. It came, for me, at the right moment in television.
Before I started watching Buffy, I really had no idea what it was all about. It seemed to be a teenage drama with vampires. I wasn’t interested, I expected it to be Dawson’s Creek or 90210. It was my brother in law that introduced it to me. He was trying to tell me it was like nothing else on TV, etc. He got me interested and I was hooked.
The metaphorical aspect of the teenage drama was turned around by Joss. No longer is high school metaphorincally hell, it is positioned on the Hellmouth. Your biology teacher isn’t metaphorically going to eat you alive, she will literally eat you alive. You lose your virginity to someone you love, only he turns into a monster once you have given him your innocence. Yet, it was so well written and so relatable that we came out in droves to see what was going to happen next. Buffy wasn’t just the heroine who saved the world once a week, she was flawed, she failed and she made bad decisions. What mattered is that she evolved, she grew and she learned.
I didn’t have the same connection to Angel that I did with Buffy, but I still enjoyed the show.
Firefly was some of the best TV I’ve ever seen.
I’ll confess I was a bit disappointed in Serenity - when your heroes are a bunch of scruffy characters operating at the edge of the law’s reach in order to make a living, and you then have them save the Universe, it really leaves them with nowhere to go.* It’s hard to imagine what a post-Serenity episode of Firefly would be like.
*As one issue of the old Howard the Duck comic was titled, “Where do you go - what do you do - the night after you’ve saved the Universe?” Always loved that one. 
I have little-to-nothing to say about Whedon. Just about threads like this one.
There are so many threads that ask, “Why does EVERYBODY Love This?” or “Why Does EVERYBODY Hate That?” And with rare exceptions, the things “everybody” hates are extremely popular, while the things “everybody” loves have, at most, small-but-devoted audiences.
“Titanic” was the biggest hit in movie history when it came out, but it wouldn’t surprise me at al lto see a thread entitled “Why does Everybody Hate Titanic?”
Meanwhile, Monty Python never had huge success (if they had, would John Cleese be doing so many commercial,s or would Eric Idle be appearing in crud like “Casper”?). But I’m sure I could find a thread entitled, “Why Does Everybody Love Monty Python”?
Joss Whedon would probably scoff at the idea that “everybody” loves him. He’s been successfully, certainly, but none of his TV shows attracted a huge audience by, say, “Amrican Idol” or “CSI” standards. And I sure didn’t see “Avatar”-type lines at the box office for “Serenity.” Whedon would probably ask, “If everybody loves me, why am I not rolling in dough like Spielberg or Cameron?”
When people ask “Why does EVERYBODY love or hate this or that,” I always infer that what they’re REALLY asking is, “Why does everybody in my small, unrepresentative circle of friends like or hate this, when I don’t? This piece of culture is obviously aimed at me and/or people like me. Why am I not reacting to it the same way all my friends do?”
Which is a very different question indeed.
I would agree that he creates great original characters and writes very compelling and witty dialogue. He is not afraid of challenging convention in storytelling, turning age-old tropes up on their head. He also keeps the focus on the audience. What I mean is that many TV and film drama writers get so caught up making their point, in executing their vision, that they weigh their shows down with a seriousness that hangs like a millstone around the necks of the fans. Whedon always tries to keep it fresh. It is why one episode of Angel may have you laughing out loud and smiling at the end, and the next will bring you tears of heartfelt emotion and leave you contemplating grand philosophical issues. He remembers that the point of TV and film is first and foremost entertainment, a point many TV writers, especially drama writers, forget.
I would say though he has some major downfalls as a writer. He fell into “JK Rowling” syndrome often in Buffy and Angel. A mythic universe can contain infinite possibilities, but it has to have a steady rulebook underpinning its basic mythic structure. Otherwise it just comes across as making-shit-up-as-you-go-along. This may be somewhat unavoidable for a continually created TV series, but Whedon was pretty bad about keeping a tight lid on his mythic universe. Similarly he did force his characters to change in all too convenient ways. Another poster mentioned the changes in Willow in BTVS positively. But to me the way Willow changed was completely unbelievable and totally pushed by plot convenience. In fact the Willow changes put the whole show on a downward spiral for me. Firefly showed that Whedon could be derivative too. And Dollhouse shows his worst tendency – self indulgence. That whole show is just an extended sex fantasy of Whedon’s. He showed his proclivities for mindless, passive, malleable, sex robots/sex zombies in all his other shows, but Dollhouse goes way too far in fantasy recreation to be meaningful to anyone other than himself and those with similarly strong and specific fetishes.
But even with his imperfections he is one of the most original and talented TV writers alive today.
Geeks love him because he is obviously a geek too (see: Kevin Smith, Guillermo Del Toro, pre-One More Day J. Michael Straczynski)
Dollhouse surely had some below-par episodes. But when it was good it was excellent. And I’m quite sure I don’t have those “strong and specific fetishes.”
Not seeing it.
Both are stereotypical Mad Scientists, but the Mad Scientist Who Wants to Take Over The World is an archetype that long predates both of these shows. (And, indeed, both of those writers’ births). And both are musically oriented.
And… what else?
I’m going to guess you haven’t seen much of Dollhouse’s second season. I don’t know how anyone can see what happened in the arc from “Belle Chose” to “The Attic” and somehow think that Whedon is condoning the things that he and his writers put the Actives through. It’s sort of like saying that Buffy is about the evil of pre-marital sex based on the events of season 2, or that Angel is about a vampire becoming human - it’s an oversimplistic reading of themes based on the plot and nothing else.
I think the self-awareness aspect that others have mentioned is crucial for understanding Whedon’s work. Not that he breaks the fourth wall or anything (although he occasionally toes the line), but rather that his work is always a commentary on ideas. “Objects in Space” is a meditation on the two sides of existentialism. “The Body” is about the horror of a loved one’s sudden death (worse than any Monster of the Week could bring) and the realization that you somehow have to keep your life moving in the midst of grief. “Not Fade Away” is about fighting the good fight, not to win, but just because somebody has to. “Dr. Horrible” is about the bitterness of getting everything you ever wanted at the cost of everything you need.
Hell, the entirety of “Dollhouse” is a incredibly thought-provoking exploration of identity - what does it mean to be someone, when your entire life is a construct? Can an artificial mind be a person? Are people anything more than an arrangement of neurons? Or, more specifically…
(Major spoilers for Dollhouse below)
Is Echo alive, even though she didn’t even exist before Topher erased Caroline? Is Senator Perrin a real person, even though all of his best attributes - all of the things that make him an admirable, heroic human being - were created by Rossum Corporation? Is Clyde 2.0 any less real than Clyde 1.0? Perhaps most compellingly, is the love between Sierra and Victor real, when their various imprinted personalities have never met?
I’ll be honest - I wasn’t a fan of “Dollhouse” up until near the end of the first season. But Season 2 has been some of the most compelling science fiction (i.e. not space opera, or fantasy, or “syfy,” but true-blue HARD sci-fi) ever aired on TV. I dare anyone who has watched the whole thing to say otherwise.
Oh, but most of the anti-Whedonites on this thread boast of having watched very little of his work. That makes them experts!
I’ll add his Astonishing X-Men comic quadrology as being brilliantly written.
I think Dollhouse, however, is his worst work to date. A poster in another thread described it as looking uncomfortably deep into Joss’ sexual fantasies, and I agree.
I think I’m one of the few Buffy fans who didn’t think “The Body” was all that and a bag of chips.
Let us know how it goes!
*
One of us… one of us!*
I’m going to try to be nice, because I know how the fans can be, but I come down on the side of not getting the Whedon thing, and I’ve followed his career for longer than most of his fans … ever since Alien Resurrection, which I find to be his conveniently dismissed and forgotten bastard child, seldom mentioned by fans … a film that was universally panned by anyone who appreciated the first three films for what they were; one of the things about the Alien franchise that made it unique was that every film was taken on by a different crew who gave it their own touch. Whedon got to put his touch on the last one, and I resent the fact that he essentially started his career with diminishing the tone established by a trilogy of intensely dramatic films with a litany of tongue-in-cheek jokes from forgettable one-dimensional characters who all threw the f-bomb around interjectionally rather than as part of any believable dialog, as if they were told they were doing Scarface In Space with monsters instead of rival Cuban gangs. I can already hear the fans come to his defense, inventing excuses to the effect of him playing up the fact that he was putting his own spin on it, saying “hey, it’s an Alien movie and we’re tired of it already, let’s just lampoon it with a bunch of forgettable and expendable characters who swear a lot like they did in the third one and turn it into a self-referential parody of itself, because who still takes these films seriously at this point anyway?” I never seem to hear where the Whedonites stand on that miserable chapter of his career, though I’m sure they stand with him regardless.
I still watch his new stuff with an open mind though. He has unique ideas, but the overall tone of his lack of seriousness removes me from the narrative too much to be engrossed in his stories and comes off as self-indulgent pandering to fans. He’s made a career of satirizing genre stereotypes, but I think anybody with half a brain can do that. I’ll offer that Firefly and Serenity were credible and independently standalone works that certainly warranted more material, never been a fan of Buffy or Angel though I can see why they were popular since the whole vampire and werewolf thing is still some kinda big deal, Dr. Horrible was a cute little project, and Dollhouse just didn’t really click with me either. Apologies to those who take umbrage that I don’t “get it”, but I don’t know what there is to “get” because his stuff is rarely as clever in my mind as it’s hyped up to be in the minds of others. I’ve sampled all the flavors of his writing and will continue to do so, but I can’t help feeling as though a pair of rose-colored glasses are required for viewing his stuff as much as polarized lenses are required for viewing 3D movies. It feels like he’s always trying to appeal to fans with self-referential material and that nothing can really be taken too seriously, that he’s reaching for punchlines, or making up silly words, etc. And I have a hard time getting past that. And despite how creative and brilliant everyone says his dialog is, I find a lot of his ostensibly fleshed-out characters extremely cliche, one-dimensional and predictable. Yeah, I get all his jokes and banter, mostly because they’re not very subtle and are extremely easy to get, so they aren’t challenging to me as a viewer. And he’s always doing it, trying to be witty and funny and clever, and it’s tiresome when all the fans tell me I should be laughing at it when I’m not. Sure, maybe the dialog reflects the fan culture and he’s all in tune with them, but I feel like that lessens the seriousness and depth of what could be better material if the themes were taken more seriously. It all serves as a barrier to me really getting engrossed in his stories or characters, even when I genuinely like the characters or the plot. Sorry fans.
I’d like for him to try telling a more mature story without pandering to fans and condescending to the intelligence of viewers who have no investment in his established work. It’s like if you don’t get it, it’s because you’re not part of the club that you didn’t know you needed to be in to watch his stuff in the first place, even though the fans I know all tell me that I want, no, need to be in it. It’s this fan adoration in recent years that has pushed me even further away from taking his work seriously … when you go through the experience of dealing with overzealous fans of anything, trying to have any kind of rational or constructive conversation about the material is futile. And when their idea of convincing me I missed something amounts to re-watching Firefly or Dr. Horrible ad nauseum and listening to them laugh or sing along or parrot lines back, I find it goes from stupid to bizarre, cultish, and boring very quickly. Joss has his moments, but even a blind squirrel finds a few nuts if the timing is right. Those nuts, however, aren’t nearly enough to last me through the winter of my discontent with his work, or with his biggest supporters.
So, that’s one less person in line at Comic-Con. 